How to make a character or object exist for only a period?

[RyanSurrey]

I got a pretty bad PC. I can handle max 3 characters at once. but my project got 7 characters in which 5 characters appear for only 5 seconds.
i am looking if i can delete them after their work is over and they step off screen.

[slowtiger]

Set them invisible when you don't need them.

[RyanSurrey]

Set them invisible when you don't need them.

Does that minimize the effect on rendering?

[synthsin75]

Making things invisible should help performance and rendering speed.

[slowtiger]

I'm not completely sure about this, but I think it reduces my rendering times. Could be I'm just waving dead chickens here.

[Greenlaw]

You might also try Layer Comps and output each character in its own pass. I know this makes each render go a lot faster and it probably uses less resources. It also makes it easier/faster if you need to update only one character or element later.

Also, if you output to images sequences, it should take fewer resources than rendering to a single movie file plus the usual Moho animation processes.

You can then assemble the comp in a compositing program (preferred) or, alternatively, you can import the image sequences into a new Moho scene and render that. This should allow you to render with all the characters merged on a low-performance system because now Moho doesn't need to calculate rigs, keyframe interpolations, and other processor intensive tasks. I generally prefer compositing in a third-party app like After Effects because I have more options for fx and lighting. It's also a whole lot faster if I need motion blur in a layer or scene.

FYI, my earliest projects 'Scareplane' and 'HLF' could get pretty CPU heavy but I animated and rendered much of those projects this way on a small laptop with only 4GB of RAM without issue. (For HLF, I had to do the compositing on a desktop though, but that was because the job was full HD (1920 x 1080) with motion blur applied.)